Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Avid Curiosity

Fundamentally, the salient and most permanent
impulse of the race, is an avid curiosity. The zeal
for knowledge, which inspired the first philosophers
and the first scientists, differed in no way from that to
which St Paul, in an age of new necessity, cast the
bait of the Unknown God. To-day the "men of
Athens" still greet one another with the words
"τί νέον—what news?" and await an answer. In the
country a regular formula of personal interrogation is
the preliminary to all hospitality. There results from
this insatiable attitude of enquiry, a universal, and to
the Briton, extraordinary, respect for learning, for
books as books, and for any aspect of cultural ability.
From the highest to the lowest, even to the illiterate,
this national trait has endured through the ages.